Good evening friends,

It is a beautiful evening here in flyover country. I am sitting out on the patio sipping a glass of a lovely Spanish Crianza and watching the college kids start gathering at the house a couple of doors down for their regular Friday night party. in a couple of hours, one of my neighbors will call the police, and the party will be over. In the meantime, I am heading in to get ready for a great night's sleep. I hope the start of your weekend is lovely too.

Just posting a hello for friend spidey! ;o)

It was a lovely weekekend here. We didn't really get much done. We went to a few estate sales saturday and had a lovely dinner at our favorite Italian place. Sunday we went to church and then had breakfast in the park with Sunflower's brother and his family. This evening I cooked burgers on the grill. After supper I had to go to work for a little bit. That could have gone better, but I am home now and off to bed. I hope you all had alovely weekend too.

This morning, the service manager called me aside and told me that he has offered a job to Manuel. Manuel worked for us for about five years and left about the same time Ronnie did. He left due to difficulty with this same service manager. I trained Mannie in his first job, then again for the job to which he was promoted. The service manager kept assigning him stuff from his first job, so Mannie left to go with a competitor as an alarm tech rather than a mechanical systems installer.

The competitor has been bought out by a huge construction conglomerate, and the bean counters are now in charge. They are driving everyone over there crazy with multiple levels of petty managers who do not really understand the work we do.

It will be great to get Mannie back. He is good at his job, very dependable and easy to work with. It will also cut my time on 24 hour call from two weeks out of six to two weeks out of eight.

Everyone wins!

An amazing thing happened yesterday. Three years ago, I sold a car to a co-worker. Ronnie was goint to pay me $150.00 a payday until it was paid off, at which point I would sign the title over to him. Before he was finished paying me, he was fired. (very long and involved story) Ronnie went to work for one of our competitors. In the three years I have only seen him once at a funeral.

I have the pleasure to be probably the only technician in this area who knows how to do the root level programming for one type of system. Our competitors contract with my company whenever this skillset is needed. Yesterday, I was rented to the company Ronnie works for. When I arrived onsite, it was Ronnie there with the information I needed to enter into the system and he was to test this for his customer after I was done. Once the customer was satisfied, we were on our own. Ronnie handed me a check for the remaining balance of the car loan. I was astounded! I assumed that he would try to argue that he had paid me in full and that I had ignored his request for the title. (typical Ronnie style logic)

The check was good, and Ronnie stopped by the house after dinner for the title. Once in a while, people will really surprise you......

I have not been ignoring this blog. There just has not been anything going on worth writing down. I have spent the last week at the University working on the remodel of the Admin building. I got a call early last week from Security. there had been a small fire in the basement of the Engineering building and the people in that area wanted to know why the smoke detectors didn't work. I carefully explained that there are no smoke detectors in that area, they are all heat detectors. (Heat detectors do not react to quick smoky fires) I had a meeting with the guy in charge who cut me a purchase order to change the heats to smokes. The problem is that the space in question was originally unoccupied storage space. as such. the heat detectors are what is required by the codes in force when the building was built in 1964. Now, there are offices and studios for the campus broadcasting department down there. My contact is putting together some funding to pay for a complete remodel of the fire alarm in this section. This will extend the work I have yet do do at the University another month or six weeks. a coulple of years from now, if no more projects are proposed, i will catch up.....

It has been a busy week. Tuesday I drove to a ball bearing plant a hundred miles away and repaired the fire suppression system on the heat treat furnace. Yesterday I finally managed to get the Lincoln guys on the right track to finish the job they have been trying hard to lay off onto me. They have been looking for a programming solution for a wiring problem for a couple of months. I went down there yesterday and found the wire fault in about an hour. If they would have just listened, they could have had this system working back in January. The manager of the Lincon Shop will complain about the bill as usual, but his guys should have been able to find this without me.

Last night we went to a jewelry restyling event and I had the old diamond from Sunflower's wedding ring put into a nice pendant. My older daughter bought a new ring and had the stone from an older ring reset into it.

Today I have been finishing up odds and ends at work to enable me to get back to the university.

More boring junk later......

SNOW DAY!

The snow started about 5:30 this morning. It is now 7:45, and we have had more than three inches of heavy, wet snow on top of a quarter inch or so of ice I left the house ten minutes early to go to to work. I drive a four wheel drive pickup with a utility box. It weighs seven thousand pounds. I rarely have trouble getting around, but today I got hemmed in by traffic. I sat at the same traffic light for about fifteen minutes, then turned back into the neighborhood. I was getting lined up on an alternate route when my phone rang. It was the boss.

He slipped on some ice a couple of weeks ago and broke his ankle. He can't drive and he really shouldn't be even walking with crutches. He asked me where I was, and when I told him I was working my way into the shop, he said he couldn't get out. I told him I would come and get him, but he said to just head back home. The weather is awful, and it just isn't worth the risk. The places I need to go to today probably aren't open anyway, so I have been instructed to take the day off!

Cool!